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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion. A bit like having one TV news channel that everyone is forced to watch and discuss. You can have tangents but it’s largely discouraged.

The Reddit Digg style doesn’t have this and is yet another example of the culture fracturing into a thousand little things rather than one single narrative everyone can talk about.

I get the benefits of the new Reddit model but I think it’s bad for social cohesion.

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>Forums are good in the way that they force everyone to mostly stay on a single topic of discussion.

I have the complete opposite experience. Forum on-topicness depends on the moderators and users, not the format. I've been in plenty of forums and IRC/Discords where every thread and channel devolved into general chat. I find it less likely in the ephemeral comment threads of HN and Reddit.

The criticism is valid even within rule-following on-topicness. Threads encourage splintered digressions and neglect group cohesion. There’s no back pressure for considering the “room” - every branching thread is both an invitation to participate and a side room expected to be ignored without protest if a passerby is uninterested. Even when following the rules of the format.

There is no reason to lump forums and IRC/Discord together here. If anything, the latter is closer to places like here or Reddit, where the discussions are ephemeral regardless of topicality, whereas with forums a single topic can go on for years.

the biggest issue with reddit/digg/hackernews style comments is how top comments can be gamed for profit. old forums had the problem of "first" and "bump" comments, but steering the conversation was harder.

Exactly. The "tree" part you can argue whether it's good or bad. The "upvote" part is universally bad. The fact that upvotes bump comments while downvotes will completely hide then... It's just terrible for discussion, and the reason reddit consistently devolves into echo chambers with everybody agreeing with everybody and piling on whoever doesn't.

There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.

IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it.

That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.

Discord threads are just an addon on top of a chat. It's not really a real discussion. And the discord discussions (or whatever it is called) are again flat IIRC? Slack threads are flat. Both are chat platforms first and foremost I would say.

Reddit lets you sort by Best (default), Top (highest raw score), New/Old (chronological), and also Controversial - no add-on required. It's right above the first comment.

"Best" is a time-weighted blend of scoring, so that well-voted but late contributions are more likely to be visible despite fewer overall votes. Certainly not perfect, but helps bias away from "first to comment wins"

Except that most people just go with best. Tons of new comments are shouted into the void, never to be heard by anyone except for a handful of the curious.

BYOND forums used tree comments in chronological order with an unread marker

    > top comments can be gamed for profit

This sounds poetic, but makes no sense to me. I've been here for a few years and I regularly post comments. I still have almost no idea which ones will be up-voted. However, I do know which ones will be down-voted. So tell us, how do you write a comment that can be "gamed for profit"?

you pay for upvotes from a third party upvote service.

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